Moving With Presentation

Abstract

Moving With is a short film made in partnership with Jonny Randall, to capture a precious moment in time between mother and son and their local landscape. A celebration of simple things: being together, moving together, listening, and watching all we have on our doorstep. It documents dance artist Lucy Nicholson and her son, Benji’s, regular journeys out and about in their local village of Staveley, Lake District, Cumbria. They pack a bag and walk to their favourite spots and ask themselves, …What can we hear? ... What can we see? … How shall we move?
Mother and son dance together, responding to the accompaniment of their natural surroundings with a backdrop of the beautiful national park.
We acknowledge the power and grace in stillness, slowness, gentleness, calmness – without challenge, target or adrenaline we love, appreciate, participate and experience our natural world.
The film then documents the sharing of the Moving With process through screening, workshop and drawing with local families and schools in the North West

We know that a large part of the apathy towards the climate crisis is in our othering of our ourselves in relationship to our environment and as a remote region within the Northwest, this project offered a wonderful opportunity to engage our local and wider communities with their own natural surroundings and to encourage young and old to feel more connected to their environment, not doing something in it, on it or over it but moving with it.
The film offers a unique aesthetic and creative practice – an intergenerational, sited, improvised work. We’re interested in acknowledging the embodied knowledge Benji offers this project – asserting his inherent improvisational ability as a valuable artistic aesthetic to view and learn from. We’re proposing a new way to make work, share work and engage audiences with the work.